hospice

A close friend’s grandfather is dying, though no one knows how close to death he is—perhaps months away. Even his doctor seems clueless, although perhaps he’s just not saying. In any case, he’s not asking. And even if everything were in the open and everyone on the same page—a pipe dream, I realize—no playbook would reveal itself. Dying is a concatenation of unpredictable events.

The "assisted suicide" lines used to be drawn more sharply for me. After all, I had in-the-trenches experience. My mother was a charter member of the Hemlock Society, the first national “right-to-die” organization.

During my first interview with gerontologist Robert Butler, he quoted Schopenhauer, “who always said midlife is that point in time of life when you begin to think backwards from death instead of forward from birth, which I thought was a pretty shrewd observation.” It’s certainly true of my peers.